Boundaries by Dawn Felagund

Boundaries

Read Boundaries

I tackled Nelyo in the garden at the Mingling. We rolled once over upon the grass so that he ended up on top of me. There was the ephemeral smell of crushed violets from beneath us before my nose was mashed up against his armpit. He was fumbling with the laces on my breeches.

“Watch the steps,” he said.

Not gasped or moaned or even whispered. Just said. He knows me and that I don’t care for being crushed beneath him (he’s tall!), and I know him and that he prefers to do the crushing. I wrenched my nose from his armpit and observed that, indeed, my shoulder was partly suspended over a trio of low stone stairs. He knows me and that I don’t say anything; I gasp and moan, and I rolled over and sent us down those steps.

It looked different in the two fleeting seconds of thought I allowed it before acting on my impulse (as he would call it). It looked like a tangle of limbs and whipping comingling of red and black hair before we landed—me on top—and he moaned out the gentle aches of his body that I would then proceed to bare and kiss away. In actuality, it was a painful, thumping journey in which he cracked his head and I scraped my elbow and we landed apart from each other, both of us on our backs. The “Ai!” he cried was in no way gentle, and the hand that clasped to the back of his head came away with fingers red with blood. Then: “Findekáno …”—not a gasp or a moan but a groan, of pain and exasperation.

“Sorry?” I said and, damn me, I made it into a question.

~oOo~

The healer made him follow a pencil with his eyes, then turned him around three times and had him stand on one leg, and when he wobbled and pawed at the air to regain his balance and finally stomped his foot back down to keep from falling, pronounced him as having a concussion.

“It could be worse,” I whispered as the healer scrawled something on a parchment. “You don’t need stitches.”

“What is the prescription for?” Nelyo ignored me and craned his neck to try to read the parchment, then winced at the pain of it. Nelyo is particular about prescriptions and won’t take anything that makes him drowsy and, thus, unable to work.

“It’s not a prescription,” she said. Nimelomë was my uncle’s family’s healer since before Nelyo was born, and she was accustomed to anticipating and heading off the craftiest of Fëanorian arguments like a collie intercepting clever colt. “It’s a letter to your grandfather.” Her quill scritched faster, getting it over with.

“My grand—”

“You can’t work. You can’t work for three weeks.”

Nelyo whipped his head around to look at me, irrespective of the pain. I would remind myself in the weeks to come that, as angry at me as he was, he still looked to me first for solace. Not blame. There was a pleading shimmer in his eyes that begged me to save him, to confront Nimelomë with a now-see-here that would leave her whelmed and convinced enough to tear the letter into small shreds. I did make a gesture in that direction. My lips, as they parted, made an awkward wet sound that was loud enough to make Nimelomë look up, and the words were there: Nelyo can’t not work; he’s the clerk of the king, an ambassador to the Teleri, the keystone that keeps our family from collapsing in upon itself—

“Three weeks,” said Nimelomë, “is the minimum to prevent permanent damage. And I’m sure one as important as you would not wish to be permanently damaged.” Her eyebrow quirked when she said it.

And there it was—the reason half of Fëanáro’s family wasn’t dead: because Nimelomë silenced their arguments before they were made and left no room for their raising. She was already writing again, the small noise of pen on parchment as unassailable as if she’d built a stone wall around herself. “I have to work,” Nelyo tried—Nelyo, who is consulted by kings but didn’t elicit a flicker of recognition that he’d spoken. “Last year’s grain shortage, the construction of the southern aqueduct, the debate on—”

“Will still be there in three weeks. Don’t worry.” She signed her name with a flourish, folded and sealed the letter, and presented it to me. “You will be with him over the next three weeks? There is to be no reading or writing or painting. No craftwork. No strenuous physical activity, of course, which includes horseback riding.” Her eyebrow quirked again.

I wondered sometimes what Nimelomë knew of Nelyo and me. She’d known him since he was born and cared for him all his life. Was there a way to tell that—?

We were on the steps outside her practice. Each one jarred him just enough to hurt. I could tell by the minute way the skin around his eyes winced just slightly and the hesitation cloaked as nonchalance. She had a curving ramp for the nonambulatory, but he was too proud for that. I was trying to be noisily untroubled, fluttering the sealed letter between my fingers and chattering. “I’ll read to you,” I said, “even your boring governance books. Whatever you want. We’ll go to hear music in the evenings. We’ll take walks. You’ve been meaning to see more of the city. We can do that thing people are doing? Where you have a drink in each district and keep the cup as proof?”

We reached a wide balcony that overlooked the sparkling river to the west. I waited for him to tell me we didn’t have room for more cups in the cabinet, but he said nothing. He took the parchment from my hands and considered it. For a moment, I thought he might wing it over the edge of the balcony, but his father’s defiance and my father’s recalcitrance meant that Nelyo—the keystone—was forced into conformity. He clasped it firmer against himself and met my eyes in that way I’d seen him do when delivering a disappointing truth to our grandfather (or his father, or mine). “I think I’d like to spend these three weeks away,” he said.

“Oh. Where would you wish to go?”

“By that I mean alone. I don’t know where yet.”

It was when I returned to my house that the importance of what he’d said struck me. Alone. I’d forgotten the meaning of that. We kept separate houses, of course—there were appearances to maintain—but we were never alone within them. Hadn’t been for a very long time now. But the rice simmering half-high in the pan and the silverware set left abandoned in the drawer and the undented pillow—

I’d assembled my life to accommodate two. Everywhere were lacunae that should have been filled by his presence and now were a howling absence. And tomorrow would be the same, and then, and then, and then— When would it end? What if it didn’t end?

What if I had to restock my life with smaller pans and narrower beds and half the rations?

“Don’t be foolish, Findekáno.” I spoke aloud to chase the silence that nested in the corners. “Three weeks is not—” I couldn’t bring myself to finish the thought.

~oOo~

Nelyo had been saying for a while that I lacked appropriate boundaries. Not exactly surprising in our family, according to him, but dismaying all the same when the transgressions came from me.

“I deal with enough infringement on my … everything. From everyone,” he told me once. “I need something different from you.”

I read too many romances. The tumble down the stairs had looked different in the narrative that sometimes played in my mind. I revised what had happened, wrapped my legs tighter, cradled the back of his head as we fell. What transpired in the path at the base of the stairs was extraordinary enough that he saw my actions as an urging, not a transgression. “You,” he gasped. “You turn my life into an adventure.”

Only, as I changed the number on the delivery slip to half the milk, I realized that the redoubled domesticities were far from an adventure. The ache in my chest was nothing that could be slain, conquered, or overcome. It was an abiding, in a lonely house shadowed by silence.

Aside from life conducted in halves, there were otherwise few outward signs of his absence. His clothes hung in his closet; his shoes formed neat rows upon the floor. His books, carefully ordered upon the shelves. His quills and papers, a page left half-finished upon his writing desk. He was a Fëanárion and accustomed, with an afternoon’s notice, to setting out into open land, carrying just enough to fit in a pack on his back. I stared overlong into his closet, trying to recall the spare shirt he’d taken; I felt like he should be familiar enough to me that I’d know within the space of a glance which was missing. I touched the fabric with longing fingers, but the answer did not present itself.

I took to lingering in pubs, but it was a foolish hope. He would have gone without word, undetected.

Naturally, he would have told my grandfather. I could have gone and asked him, but as I paced at the foot of my unmade bed (because Nelyo was not there to make it), I could not find words ironclad enough to elicit an answer while inviting no questions. Our families did not know about us. They still believed us only excellent, inseparable friends. I know that half of them questioned what I could possibly offer him—the ambitious, rapid-rising clerk of Noldorin King—while the other half questioned what he could possibly offer me, resplendent and unpredictable, my name always on everyone’s lips. If they’d known we were lovers? I’ve no doubt they would cast us both beyond the ashen sands of Avathar.

No, I could not ask Grandfather Finwë. He would want first to know why I didn’t know Nelyo’s whereabouts—if anyone else were seeking him, I’d be the first asked—and next to know why I wanted to know. It was already felt like Nelyo and I monopolized each other’s attention. “Your friendship with him,” my brother Turukáno told me once, “sucks all of the air out of the room. No one can get a word in with either of you if the other one is there.”

And then: “I’d think by now you’d be tired of him.”

“I don’t really see what he offers you.”

In truth, Turukáno was a lot like Nelyo. They had similar interests in lore and governance; Turukáno, though, lacked the diplomatic polish that made Nelyo indispensable to our family. The keystone, as I said earlier. The flywheel in the cogwork of our family. The stitching in the binding of our book—and other such metaphors. Turukáno, though, was none of these things. He was a vast repository of knowledge (like Nelyo was) with none of the refinement that made you want to stop and hear what he has to say. Like a rain barrel without a spigot. I could go on and say something like “doomed to harbor the larvae of mosquitoes,” but that sounds overdramatic even for me.

But, as I said, he did share similar interests to Nelyo, and their circles did overlap, although they had very little direct contact with each other. Nelyo was always too busy with me to pay any mind to his secondborn cousin, and Turukáno managed only a lackluster ploy for his attention before deciding on aloof resentment instead. And now it was like they didn’t exist to each other. He never mentioned Nelyo, and Nelyo never mentioned him. If there was a grapevine, however, upon which news of Nelyo had traveled, it had quite possibly twined itself around Turukáno’s ears before meandering onward.

Turukáno and I trained together on swords every third day of the week. In his youth, Turukáno had been a soft, sedentary child with none of the Noldorin interest in athletics or adventuring or forgework, all of which tended to make us a muscular people. He could spend his entire day behind curtains with only his books for company. Our father would occasionally force him to practice at sword and me to teach him—it was an expectation of noble-born boys that we would take up this ancient art, using blunted blades and never touching our opponent in a sport more like dancing than a martial art—but my shame at his awfulness at it was superseded only by his blatant lack of interest in it. That didn’t change until he was almost a man, and I’m convinced it was more to do with wanting to win Elenwë’s attention and realizing that he couldn’t do it with arms as shapeless as stovewood and a belly as soft as unpressed cheese than it was any interest in swordwork itself. Nonetheless, he threw himself entirely into it, as Turukáno was wont to do, and he became quite good.

We practiced weekly in an open-sided tholos that marked the joining of the northern and eastern walls of the royal quarters of Tirion. The view was spectacular, looking along the Pelóri marching into the gloaming of the north. When I arrived, Turukáno was in the midst of visualization, kneeling between two of the columns to the north, his buttocks nestled against his heels and his palms flat on his thighs. His eyes were closed. I leaned in close but his eyes weren’t even roving behind closed lids, and you could have marked time by the breaths passing in and out of his nose. Turukáno claimed that he became so good at swordwork so fast because of visualization: essentially imagining himself doing sprawling, heroic moves over and over again until, I suppose, he became convinced he could actually do it? It would be like Turukáno to take swordwork, the most physical of pursuits, and turn it into an intellectual endeavor.

“Go away, Findekáno.” His voice startled me. I was lost in thought and had let go of my breath, and he’d felt it in his face. Without opening his eyes, he added, “I have told you at least two dozen times to give me my space while I finish my visualization. Now I shall have to start the final sequence again.”

“Right, right, sorry.” I feigned ignorance and walked to the eastern side of the tholos that looked toward Alqualondë. Faintly, at the end of the Calcirya, I imagined an indigo strip between sky and land: the sea. I whipped my sword around over my head to warm up.

Without removing his hands from his thighs, Turukáno rocked back onto his heels, unfolded his legs, and stood. “Never mind. I can’t concentrate with all that noise. I won’t be at my best but let’s get started.”

Turukáno had a way of making me feel like I always owed him an apology. He should have been the firstborn child: He was dignified and learned as a firstborn should be (and as firstborns were, in our family, with the exception of me). We began with slow work. His footwork was impeccable, as precise as a trained dancer’s. His sword skimmed so close to my face that I felt the coolness radiating from its steel. We sped up. There were entire books of footwork patterns; Turukáno possessed them all. I knew the footwork—Nelyo had taught me (he owned all the books too)—but swordwork still had a reactive component for me, which was how I justified not paying attention enough to remember the correct patterns.

“Damn it, Findekáno!” I’d misstepped, right onto Turukáno’s toe. He hopped about for a few seconds in a way I found excessive and unnecessary and overly dramatic. I’d been thinking about a way to bring up the topic of Nelyo and where he’d gone and whether Turukáno had heard anything.

We began again. I forced myself to pay better attention. We edged up the speed again; we were going quite fast now. Without requiring a word, we slipped from mirrored practice to sparring. His feet danced around mine; his sword sought an unguarded gap on my body but only met my own blade until, at last, I swung my sword over my head in a showy, undignified way that brought it to hover over his shoulder.

I still win most of our bouts, though if one were to graph his progress and mine and extend it into a trendline, I won’t be winning for much longer. Briefly, he propped his hands on his thighs and breathed through his mouth before remembering himself and straightening, the only sign of his exertion the slight flaring of his nostrils. “Well fought,” he said at last, extending his hand to me. “Shall we go again?”

“What news from the court?” I asked as we began again with slow mirrored steps to accustom ourselves to the other’s motions and the space around our bodies.

“Please, Findekáno,” came his sharp reply. “Like you need to hear that from me when you have Our Cousin.”

(He did not actually make Our Cousin into a proper noun, were he to write it, but one could hear the capital letters in his voice.)

I found my in. “Actually,” I forced my voice to fit behind the slow sweeps of my sword, “Nelyo has gone away to travel for a while.”

We sped up and fell into sparring. “Did he now? Is he finally wearied of you?”

My blade slipped and nearly rang against his. Perhaps a sheet of paper would have passed between them—no more. “Careful now!” he warned.

I could not bring myself to lie to my brother. “Perhaps,” I said. “I am surprised you did not know he was gone. I suspected you would not only that he’d departed for a while but where.”

A bitter laugh. “I am not privy to the goings of Nelyafinwë Fëanárion.” A close call, but my blade slipped into place and rose, forcing his upward too. If they touched, the bout would be over. Steps like a string of pearls brought him back around and into position. “And are you truly trying to convince me that he left without telling you where he’d gone and writing you a five-page letter a day from wherever it may be?”

“I’m not trying to convince you of anything,” I said, “though that is the truth. I have no idea where he’s gone.”

His sword slipped between us. With his free hand, he pressed the blade just shy of touching my belly. If I let out my breath, he would lose for touching me. If it were a real sword, he would have sliced through his own hand. I held my breath and my “Nicely done” came out as just a whisper.

He wheeled away. “I don’t know where he’s gone, Findekáno.” He retrieved a canteen from where it leaned against the northmost column and looked north—anywhere but at me—as he drank deeply. Most people would have tossed a “Sorry” over their shoulder. Not my brother.

~oOo~

Nelyo and I grew up together—or rather, I grew up with him. He was near adulthood when my father foisted me upon Fëanáro’s family for the summer, hoping they could make something of me. I was just thirteen, and a sniveling thirteen at that. We were both well past adulthood—the top two most eligible bachelors in Tirion, both of us with an impressive roster of girlfriends-who-never-became-fiancées—the night we both got a little drunk and made out in our grandfather’s wine cellar. After that, Nelyo sat me down and explained that that could, simply put, never happen again.

“I am sure you’ve figured out by now that my … romantic life … is not entirely pleasing to me,” he said.

“Sure. Else you’d be married off by now.” I was flippant, which was one of the ways I covered my nervousness. Inside, my heart was pounding like one of the big drums they used to synchronize the rowers on a Telerin longship.

I’d had a crush on Nelyo forever. Or for a long time, at least. He was how I figured out I liked men, sexually that is. As a young adolescent, I nearly worshipped him; he was to me the paragon of beauty and grace and wisdom and everything we were told we should strive to be. I told myself that I sought to emulate him—until I reached the age where he began to fill my dreams at night, in innocuous ways—riding a horse or stretching for a book in the library or drinking with his lips wrapped around a waterskin—that nonetheless left my sheets damp. The charwoman must have told my father, which provoked one of the most awkward and unnecessary conversations of my life, in which I was warned about the “perils” of “going too fast” with girls and told that masturbation was Perfectly Natural and that my body was going through Strange Changes which were also Perfectly Natural. Honestly, I never needed to hear my father say the word “masturbation” (or “ejaculation” or “pubic hair”); I was perfectly content with the education I’d received from my cousins and peers when we loitered in the streets of Tirion. He certainly left me in no mood to confide to him the contents of my dreams.

Anyway, all this to say that I was hoping Nelyo would confess a crush on me too and a desire to have an affair with me. I wouldn’t even have played coy or hard-to-get.

Instead, he said, “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you—not now anyway—that I enjoy the company of men as well as women.” (I squirmed a little, hopeful.) “But that kiss … that can never happen again.”

One time, Turukáno had a balloon from a merchant, filled with a light gas that made it float. The balloon was blue and painted with stars. My cousin Curufinwë, who is a few years younger than my brother, aimed a crossbow he’d made at it and shot a bolt through the balloon and popped it. Turukáno was too old for such things anyway, but that did not stop him from howling as though Curufinwë had shot the bolt directly into his heart. That’s what I felt like doing when Nelyo’s words “never happen again” settled upon my brain like the shreds of a child’s painted, popped balloon. I wanted to flop on my belly and pound my fists the way you sometimes saw toddlers do when they were deprived of a sweet.

But I was grown, an adult, also the son of a high prince and with a certain amount of dignity to uphold. Or, mostly, I wanted to impress Nelyo that I was capable of being adult about all this. I did become aware that I was twisting my fingers. They hurt. And I’m afraid I was rather pop-eyed with anticipation and hope that was not dying an easy death, and my mouth was open a bit. My heart was pounding so loudly that I might have heard him wrong? Oh, let me have heard him wrong!

But, no, when I said nothing, he went on. “Surely you understand, Káno. Even if it weren’t a double taboo—two men! and first cousins!—our family is in such a delicate situation right now, a situation that, if not resolved properly, could be ruinous for our people. We have to walk so, so lightly, and another scandal—”

“Half,” I said.

He’d clearly prepared the words he was saying to me. I knew the way he blinked when derailed from a lecture he’d intended to deliver straight-through; Tyelkormo and I used to do it intentionally, when we were children and he was trying to teach us. He blinked at me now. “What?” he said.

“Half,” I repeated. “We’re half first cousins.”

Just as it used to, his face firmed into that you’re-being-ridiculous look of disapproval. My heart broke a little inside me.

 

“Findekáno. I need to set this boundary with you. Clearly, I am—was—interested. Were you not my cousin? Were I not in a situation where allowing a scandal to wreck what frail progress I have made in holding together our family? Maybe it’d be different. But I have to set this boundary.”

I’m sure I tried to argue, and I’m sure he refused. Six younger brothers—and me; don’t forget that I was ever among them, at his feet and in his shadow—had taught him the folly of embarking on foolish arguments. I thought of the boundary drawn between the realms of my grandfather and King Ingwë of the Vanyar so that, in traveling between Taniquetil and Tirion, their subjects knew which sets of laws to follow. The boundary was drawn in flowers—it was friendly—but to cross it … things changed.

“Boundaries are set to be crossed, Nelyo,” I said in a way I hoped sounded defiant and not petulant.

He sounded tired. “Not this one, Findekáno. Please don’t try to cross this boundary.”

Naturally I did. Try to cross it, I mean. I paced in my room for a long while that night. I began in despair at my ruined dream—now when Nelyo reached for the top shelf in the library and he was wearing a shirt he’d outgrown and it lifted and exposed his ribs, there would be a tinge of sadness but also of the forbidden, and of shame—and I will admit I wept. But then the despair became anger. And I will admit I punched things: not soft things either, like your mother tells you to do when you’re little and angry, but things that hurt my knuckles and made me bleed. And I called Nelyo awful names, even in a whisper, not just in my head. Finally, the anger gave way to determination. I would not—could not—feel this way forever.

I took myself down the hall to his room. I knocked but was already opening the door when he called for me to come in. He was in bed, nodding off over a book. His crimson hair was unbound and fanned behind him on the pillow. It was a hot night, and the thin silk sheet that covered him from the hips down was clearly all he wore. I went and sat on the edge of his bed and took the book from his hands and clapped it shut and put it on the night table. There was a bookmark there but fuck it.

“Ulmo’s water, Findekáno!” He was groggy but clearly upset that I’d lost his place. He reached for the book, so I gave it an extra shove that sent it out of reach and almost to the floor. “What in the—”

I touched his face.

Instantly he stilled and quieted. “Boundaries are meant to be crossed, Nelyo,” I said. “When our grandfather and Ingwë planted those flowers between their cities, they didn’t do it to stop people from coming over. They did it so people would know, hey, the rules have changed here! I need to be a little different on this side! So there’s a boundary for us. That doesn’t mean we don’t cross it! Oh, we cross it, my love, but we just act differently on the other side. Carefully.”

His hand had risen to my wrist. I believe he meant to toss my hand away, but when I said “my love,” the touch changed. He covered my hand with his, slid it from his face to his throat, his chest. I could feel his heart thundering under my palm. I think he wanted to slide it further down, but he lost his courage there, so I helped him by leaning over and kissing him.

He kept his lips firmly shut against mine for maybe three seconds, then they parted, and our tongues touched and tangled as they had in the wine cellar, and his hand carried mine on the rest of its journey to ribs and belly and hip and—

He pulled me into bed with him and flipped me onto my back. “Damn it, Findekáno,” he said and crushed me.

~oOo~

I moped around the city for several days after the sparring session with Turukáno, not even actively listening for news of Nelyo but resigned in a self-pitying way that I would not find him. Meanwhile, I discovered an additional, unexpected discomfiture when I sent a courier to the greengrocer to request a delivery of fruits and vegetables for the week and ended up with twice what I could use. I found I lacked the courage to return Nelyo’s half—mostly because I knew I’d have to explain, and even if no one but me understood the true significance of Nelyo being gone, I could not abide the possibility of having to answer questions, namely the innocent, “Oh? Where has he gone?” and having no answer—so I spent the week inadvertently vegan. By the fifth day, longing dreams of Nelyo had been replaced by longing dreams of sandwiches on thick bread, piled high with meat and cheese. That more than anything invested me with the gumption to go to the greengrocer myself to halve the next order (and cancel all of the greens; I could not abide another bite of chard), even if I had to make up a lie.

I rarely went to her shop. I let Nelyo select our fruits and vegetables; besides, he liked her, since they both had a shared interest in plant breeding. The little bell over her door jingled at my entrance, and I had to mill around for a few minutes before she appeared from the greenhouses out back, wiping her hands on an apron laden with tools. She smiled to see me. “Prince Findekáno! What a lovely surprise.”

I mumbled something about needing to change my order. The words were scarcely out when she said, “Indeed, I was surprised when you requested your normal quantities, since I know you tend to dine with Maitimo, and he’s gone to the north with his family. Shall I just halve the normal quantities?” She had pulled a sheet of paper from a file and was already making marks with a grubby pen.

I swayed a little on my feet, and the fruit flies made a regular traffic in and out of my open mouth for several long moments as what she’d said registered with me. He’d gone to the north. With his family. Of course! The Fëanorians headed north every summer when the temperature in Valinor went from pleasingly-and-blandly-warm to plain hot. In their line of work, it made sense, and both Fëanáro and Nerdanel had studied and traveled enough in the north that the more suitable weather served also as a pretense for returning to their friends, whose interests and skills in craft more closely matched their own. Manwë’s tongue! I’d been there with them dozens of times myself, to their jumbled-looking house that people joked Fëanáro added a new wing to every time he had another son (which was actually fairly close to the truth) and its warren of hallways and courtyards and libraries and workrooms dropped seemingly at random until the Light from the south came in just right or until you found your need for solitude or music or drink or company unexpectedly suited by its straggling layout. Of course he’d gone there. It hadn’t even crossed my mind that Fëanáro had gone yet, though come to think of it, my father had been exceedingly calm late—

The greengrocer was watching me with lifted eyebrows, waiting for an answer. “Oh!” I said. An unfortunate fruit fly met its demise on my tongue. “Actually! I’m heading up to meet them. The heat—”

(It was a fairly cool day.)

I fanned myself with the neck of my tunic, as though that would make it believable that it was hot. “I could use a break from it! And hunting with Tyelkormo, and there’s a metallurgy question that’s been bugging me that I could really use Curufinwë’s thoughts on …”

Crooked stars of Varda, anyone who knew me would see the lie. I was warm now, with humiliation. I fanned a little harder. Thankfully, my aversion to fruits and vegetables meant that the greengrocer knew absolutely nothing about me beyond the royal rumors that served as entertainment in the taverns and pubs at night and which had nothing to do with metallurgy. So she just smiled and filed the paper away and said, “I’ll stop your order then until your return. I wish you safe travels!”

Once I was outside, I could wipe the poor fruit fly off my tongue. And I headed home to pack.

~oOo~

When I was a kid, I traveled north with Nelyo’s family on horseback and a wagon carrying our trunks. The sons of Fëanáro and Nerdanel were schooled young in the art of efficient packing in a way that I never was. I still stung with humiliation at the memory of my uncle stripping out more than half of the clothes and items in my trunk on that first trip with them, not so much because of my own ignorance—I was thirteen!—but because of what it revealed of my father’s disconnection with the Noldor who lived to the north and south of Tirion, beyond Valinor. My father clearly didn’t know that dress robes would not be needed among people who used the idiom “take in the dust” for lunch, often eaten at their worktables. My travels with Nelyo’s family had, at least, earned our family some capital with the households to the north. In the south, we could all drop dead and I don’t think anyone would notice much less care. There was only one Noldorin prince in the minds of the people who lived south of Hyamentir, and his name was Fëanáro. Anyway, the journey north used to take a long time, as I remembered it, and it was simultaneously arduous while feeling like a great adventure. I often found it miserable going when I was small—the heat and the bugs and the weather that my aunt, uncle, and cousins did not seem to even notice much less mind—yet somehow always looked forward to doing it again.

Now that I’m older, it’s faster going. No longer do I have to adjust my pace to the small sons of Fëanáro—and there always seemed to be at least one (and if I’m being honest, they likely slowed down for my sake too)—and there are more rapid means of traveling than going on horseback and stopping each night to camp.

I took a fast stage from the city as far as the first river. The boundaries of Valinor aren’t drawn in or marked by flowers; the Valar claim sovereignty of all of Aman and would have you believe that Aman and Valinor are synonymous. One doesn’t have to go far to see the fallacy in this claim. The farther one wanders from Valmar—and I have, thanks to Nelyo and his family, wandered quite a bit of it—the less … tamed … the world becomes. That’s the only way to think of it. It doesn’t look appreciably different, at least in the summer—the leaves do change and fall in the autumn, and it snows in the winter, if you go far enough north or south—but in Valinor, there is always a sense of artifice. The weather is mild and contrived. They have made some small effort at seasons in that it is warmer in the summer and slightly rainier in the winter, as a concession to the origins of the Eldar in the Outer Lands, where time was marked by dramatic seasonal changes. It rains regularly and at convenient times, unless it is to provide the cooling delight of a summer rain on a hot afternoon. It never snows, and ice is brought from the lakes to the north and used only to cool food and drink. Plants never overtake each other; you get what you want in your garden, not weeds. Paths do not become overgrown. Nothing tumbles into ruin. Nothing dies.

But north of the river, that begins to change. Leaves yellow and flowers wither and there is some of the rapacity that comes from limited resources. It used to be, when I was young, that you had to ford at a shallow crossing or take the ferry a half-day’s ride south. Now there is a bridge, courtesy of my father, to ease travel between Tirion and the northern villages. The northerners couldn’t care less; they still cross at ford and ferry. But for a citified prince looking to reunite and make amends to his lover, the bridge does allow for an extra iota of haste. I doubt that was my father’s intention in building it.

A village has grown up on either side of the bridge, offering accommodations and necessities to travelers. There is a continuous-run wagon that leaves twice per day for Formenos. It will journey for half the day, then stop to rest for the next half, at which point you will be transferred to the other wagon that has just finished its half-day’s rest. In the village north of the river, I make my reservation and get the last seat on the next wagon, leaving in an hour. The driver is already supervising his cargo being loaded. I wander over to see if I can help: tools, mostly, along with several bolts of fabric and a swaying tower of vegetable crates. I peer inside one. Chard! Damn it! I help to load the tools and the fabric, and we set out on the road ten minutes early.

A continuous journey to Formenos goes much faster than having to stop constantly for children to eat or pee or to break up fights, and giving half your day to making camp, camping, then breaking camp, not to mention the several waterfalls and lakes and hot springs that were required diversions on the way. (The other passengers chatted and snacked and tried to read on the lurching wagon, naïve to the beauty just beyond this row of trees or that pile of rocks that I knew was there and hadn’t thought of in years and suddenly wanted again. I let the nostalgia for those places and the gentler times they represented settle like sickness in my stomach.) After an initial interest in my presence there, I was ignored, and I was the only solo traveler, which gave me plenty of time to think and, yes, to plot. For I was ignoring Nelyo’s wishes yet again—I was not ignorant of that fact—and I knew I’d need the right words for him to see my transgression as an act of desperation, of an inability to live without him, rather than a … well, a transgression. I wrote notes of what I might say and scribbled them out and, when we stopped for relief breaks, used the emptied wagon as my stage to practice the gestures and expressions that might turn my words—dull and flat as slate—into something that might convey even a pinch of the fierce love and longing I felt for him. I wanted my words to coruscate like Laurelin upon a cut diamond, to make him cringe away from the blaze of emotion he sensed behind them the way one cannot look on light too bright. To hold out his hands to me and say, I get it now, Findekáno. I get it, and … no, Findekáno, don’t apologize to me. I’m the one who is sorry.

Well, an apology was probably asking a bit much, especially in the larger context of my having caused him a head injury, but if I was going to steep myself in fantasy and wishful thinking, I might as well go full-bore.

~oOo~

 

It took two days of traveling nonstop, except for relief breaks, to reach Formenos. As a child, it was a weeklong journey with Nelyo’s family. I was let off in the middle of the town-quickly-becoming-a-city and set to walking toward Fëanáro’s estate, set just in sight of the town walls. It felt good to stretch my legs after so many days of sitting, though after so long in the jostling wagon, I wobbled a little as I commenced my walk. I scanned the shops and street vendors as I went, hoping I might find a gift that would soften his feelings toward me, his transgressor yet again, but gift-giving becomes impossible when the one you love comes from a family containing the most illustrious craftsmen of the Noldor. There was nothing there that his father or brother couldn’t whip up for him in an afternoon.

Passing through the east gate, Fëanáro’s house came in view. I hadn’t seen it for years, since the last addition at the birth of the twins. A banner flew from its tallest tower, announcing that Fëanáro was in. I’d heard of this new habit of his (not from Nelyo, who commented little on his father these days except in the most oblique of terms) but I felt a sting of embarrassment for him nonetheless, at so blatant a display of how his values had been eroded by jealousy toward my father. Fëanáro had always shunned the trappings of nobility—I remember that my silver prince’s circlet was the first item discarded from my trunk in that long-ago summer when I was thirteen—and insisted that he earn his own renown “on the virtue of his words and work.” (I’d heard this speech so many times. Seven young princes require a lot of answering as to why they must weed the garden, and they must muck the stalls, and they must wash the dishes, not a gardener and groom and scullery maid. I was always too terrified to protest; I did my assigned chores without comment.) The uncle I’d known in my childhood wouldn’t expect anyone to care that he was in—and for those who would care to have reason to know when he was anyway—and were he to signal attendance, would use anything but a banner with all its connotations. A broken flowerpot, perhaps.

Beneath Fëanáro’s banner were three smaller, crimson flags and the double pennant of the Ambarussa. So both the twins and three others of the sons were in, Nelyo, Carnistir, and Curufinwë, most likely. I slowed and watched the highest of the banners stirring in the languid breeze and tried to subdue the jumble of feelings in my heart into a speech that would both tame his anger and persuade him to allow me back.

My musings were interrupted when an arrow nearly sliced off the tip of my nose. I staggered back and whipped around toward a heap of boulders, where Ambarto wasn’t even bothering to hide himself and was, in fact, nocking another arrow!

“Stop!” I yelled in a voice that had none of the comportment and, with it, authority that Nelyo would have mustered in such a situation. Rather, I sounded like a maiden who didn’t want to be tossed into a fountain by her overly playful boy-friend. “You almost hit me!”

“Naturally,” he said, drawing his arm back and taking aim. “If I’d meant to hit you, I would have.”

Ambarussa was beside him then, like the shadows had clotted into the shape of a person. He touched his brother’s arm, and Ambarto lowered the arrow. They were both near manhood by now and supposedly so alike in face that they could not be told apart. I had no such trouble. Maybe it was knowing them their whole lives, but Ambarto had a hardness to his eye and (dare I say of one still a child, albeit barely?) a sinister twist to his mouth, while Ambarussa was weird and dreamy.

They marched me down to the house, where a trickle of smoke from the kitchen chimney and the smell of roasting garlic told me that supper preparations were underway. I tried to make small talk with them—“Are you enjoying the summer? Get any deer lately? How’s the weather been holding up?”—but talking with the twins was like throwing pebbles at a mountain (Ambarto) where they made not even a whisper of sound or impression or into a big cloudy pond (Ambarussa) where you know the words went in but what happened to them? Never for me to know.

There was a small porch near the back of the house that served as a summer dining area when half or less of the family was present, and the twins brought me there. To his credit, even though his eyebrows popped up in a way that articulated, “Well then!” better than the words themselves would have, Uncle Fëanáro welcomed me warmly. He had his hands full of a platter piled high with noodles in a brown sauce and chunks of meat around the edge of the plate; the aroma made my stomach grumble loudly in protest of having forced it to derive nutrition out of a basket these past two days. “Boys, set the table,” he said, and the twins disappeared through the kitchen door. To me he said, “Sit. There’s plenty here.”

“Oh, I can h—”

“Sit. It’s a long journey.” Carnistir had appeared from the kitchen with a loaf of bread, and Tyelkormo with a wheel of sharp cheese. Tyelkormo? I began to feel a note of misgiving. The three banners—Carnistir and Curufinwë never left their father’s company, so if Tyelkormo were here, that meant Nelyo—

Tyelkormo had inherited his father’s impetuousness undistilled by any notion of propriety. His eyes widened at the sight of me, and he said, “Findekáno? What are you doing here?”

As though to confirm my suspicion, Curufinwë—the third banner—made his appearance from the kitchen, bringing two brimming decanters of wine, one in each hand. He cast a sharp look at Tyelkormo, who had frozen in place and had yet to set down the wheel of cheese. “What my brother means to say,” Curufinwë said, pouring my wine first, “is that we haven’t seen you here in a long time.”

The twins were shifting uneasily behind me, and I realized I’d plopped into one of their chairs so they wouldn’t be able to sit next to each other. A sharp look from Fëanáro, first at them, then at me, made me drop back into the seat before I’d risen more than an inch and sent them, without complaint, to either side of me like bizarre bookends. Fëanáro said the Eruhantalë. I’d forgotten about that. As a child, I’d liked it: the thanking of Eru for the food and other blessings. Now, I was trying to think of a reason why Nelyo might actually be here, even though there were only three banners and he clearly wasn’t here. We went around the table and said what we were thankful for. When it came to me, I said, “I’m thankful to have real food to eat. And that you let me eat it without yelling at me.” And I said a prayer in my mind about finding Nelyo, even though everyone but my uncle would deem it disrespectful to think my petty concerns worthy of the consideration of The One.

After the Eruhantalë was complete, Fëanáro heaped a pile of noodles on his plate and said, “Why would you think I would yell at you? You always have a home here, Findekáno. I don’t punish the son for the sins of the father.”

It took a lot for me to not sniff with laughter at the irony in that statement. I gulped water to hide the look on my face. It is hard to believe he was naïve of it. Surely he wasn’t. Fëanáro was nothing if not complex.

“Why are you here?” Tyelkormo repeated his earlier question, leaning forward with that ever-earnest gleam in his blue eyes.

“Oh, button it, Tyelko, you’re being unbelievably rude!” Curufinwë muttered.

But I could tell it was the question they all wanted an answer too, even weird little Ambarussa who had taken nothing but meat and was sawing it all into little pieces before eating it. I decided to risk honesty. That and I was too tired from the journey to derive a convincing lie so quickly. “I am here to see Nelyo,” I said. “When will he be back? Or is he merely dining in the town tonight?”

All of the sons looked to their father, who was chewing on a piece of meat. He extracted a bone from his mouth, turned it this way and that and looked at it, set it on the edge of his plate, chewed pensively, swallowed, and said, “You’d be the one I’d expect able to answer that. I haven’t seen Nelyo in the better part of a year.”

~oOo~

I stayed on for a few days with my uncle’s family, hoping for a crumb of information that would lead me to Nelyo. When I was a child, they were inseparable, the Fëanorians. They never did not know where the others were, and at times, they knew too much: who kept sneaking extra pastries, who was kissing a girl behind the rosebushes, who persisted in peeing in the garden. Privacy was not a concept any of them grasped, contrary to my father’s house, where each of us was given our discrete space and expected others to transgress only after a knock and permission. I half-expected, at some point during my days with them, to keep someone company during his bath and be told a rambling and slightly bawdy story constructed primarily on hearsay that would lead me to Nelyo.

Instead, no one spoke of the absent family members. Aunt Nerdanel was gone, and no one spoke of where she’d gone. Macalaurë, I gleaned, was with his wife’s family in Alqualondë, but no one anticipated his return. And Nelyo—they hadn’t seen him for a year.

The house was quieter than I ever remembered it. Suppers were subdued, and bedtimes no longer protracted by the need to gallop between each other’s rooms to gossip and squabble and snicker. We were yelled at far less, and the silence hurt worse here than it had in Tirion. I slipped back into my routine of childhood, doing the laundry (Tyelkormo used to be forced to help me; he didn’t offer and no one forced him this time), but there was far less than I remembered, and even out of practice, it didn’t take nearly as long either, leaving me with time to walk the gardens and grounds or to the town, where I took up a seat at each of the taverns in turn, but Nelyo’s name was never mentioned. This far north, there was little concern for the affairs of court—and he was very much now part of our grandfather’s court.

At last, as I felt the tense silence of Fëanáro’s home beginning to efface the memories I cherished from my childhood, I decided to leave. I had decided I would go to Alqualondë. Nelyo had always loved Macalaurë above all others (except me), and the two of them visited each other often. I had learned in one of the taverns that Macalaurë had composed a new arrangement that he would be performing in Alqualondë; it was very possible Nelyo had gone to hear that? Forbidden from books and writing, it is possible that sitting by the sea, listening to his brother rehearse, would have withheld the madness that such a proscription would normally provoke.

So I reserved my place on another continuous-run wagon, this one journeying all the way through the mountain pass and onto Alqualondë, and returned home for one final supper with my uncle’s family before I’d leave early the next morning. At the accustomed time, I took my place in line in the kitchen, chopping carrots while Fëanáro muttered over bubbling pots, Carnistir dressed a chop with a deftly wielded knife, and the twins fidgeted over the potatoes they’d been instructed to peel, taunted by the perfect summer day outside. (Tyelkormo and Curufinwë hadn’t shown up, which wouldn’t once have been tolerated but was not now remarked upon.)

Carnistir’s knife slipped between flesh and bone and parted one from the other. “You can see why it matters, perhaps.”

I’d been lost in my own thoughts, already—in my own mind—on the next day’s journey to Alqualondë, again rehearsing what I would say to Nelyo, the rhetoric, the excuses, the begging of pity and pardon. I startled when he spoke: “What?”

“Nelyo’s work.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, but he offered nothing else, and I knew Carnistir well enough to know that he would not be pushed.

The next morning, I rose early, before Laurelin even began to blush with morning light, and dressed for my journey. As I tried to ease open the latch on the front door without evoking its usual deafening skreeeek, my foot bumped something: a basket, filled with food from my uncle’s larder and a novel to keep me company on the road.

As the wagon rattled over the rutted roads of the north, I did try to read, but my mind was already far ahead, in Alqualondë.

~oOo~

I’ve always believed that, of anyone, Macalaurë was the closest to knowing the truth about Nelyo and me. At one point, even, I accused Nelyo of telling him, but Nelyo insisted he hadn’t. The circumstances were this:

We were in Alqualondë, though I do not remember why. Probably something to do with King Olwë because we were staying at the palace. I remember we were staying at the palace because, as the eldest of Finwë’s grandsons, Nelyo got a really nice room. It was more like its own apartment with its own kitchen (and cook! whom Nelyo dismissed right away in service to his father’s ideals about egalitarianism, ignoring my protests) and two sitting rooms and a bedroom with a vast bed. It also had its own private balcony, overlooking the sea, with a small, amorphously shaped pool of warm water for soaking in. The little pool also came with an attendant, whom Nelyo also dismissed to enjoy the festival—

(Festival! It was the Telerin festival they call the sailing forth, which opens the fishing season.)

—but this time I did not protest because Nelyo and I, that first night, made furious and nonstop love in that little pool. I’d never made love in a warm pool before, just in the cramped confines of our bathtubs back at home, and it was delicious. It was helped by a bottle of lemon-yellow Telerin mead that must have gotten the bees drunk making the honey because it left Nelyo utterly uninhibited to where I would have worried about the amount of noise he was making if, one, I wasn’t thoroughly drunk myself and, two, we weren’t in Alqualondë where attitudes toward sex are decidedly less buttoned-up than in Tirion. Anyway, Nelyo uninhibited in bed? Is a force of nature, like making love with an electrical storm.

After we thoroughly defiled the little pool, we went into the vast bed and rolled around in that together to dry off. There was a second bottle of mead. It was like drinking Treelight, and I will confess that I do not remember much of the night after the second glass, just waking up the next morning without an erection for once because everything down there was curled up and sleeping off its many debaucheries. Without an erection but with a splitting headache. I kept thinking about the Teleri and their watermelons and the way they split them with a blade stabbed dead-center and then levered to open them up. That’s what my head felt like.

Coming around to Macalaurë, this is how I ended up alone on the beach with him that day while everyone else went to play in the sea. My eyes stung at the light spilling through the Calcirya and sparkling on the water, so I’d turned my back to the sea and was sipping at a mug of water (Nelyo, naturally, was not hungover because somewhere in the midst of our passionate romp, he’d also managed to drink enough water) and trying not to vomit. Macalaurë hadn’t gone out either because he was in the throes of inspiration and was plucking at a lute and stopping every few minutes to scribble what he was playing into a notebook. He wasn’t saying much, which was fine by me. I’d grown up with Macalaurë too, of course, but I never felt terribly close to him. I think, with the intensity of the love we both bore Nelyo—very different flavors of love, of course—it was impossible for us to also be close ourselves. So I was used to him not saying much to me.

I had dipped the corner of Nelyo’s towel, left discarded on the chair next to me, into my mug and was using it to cool my forehead and trying not to groan when Macalaurë spoke suddenly: “You know, the culture is really different here, what’s permitted and accepted, I mean.”

Macalaurë’s wife was half-Telerin, and my close-aged cousins and I had made lots of jokes about how lucky he was because of the permissive sexual mores of the Teleri relative to the Noldor. He could also be a little irritating with his claim to superior knowledge about Telerin culture, so with my head feeling like it was about to burst like a party favor but erupting with gravel instead of soft tufts of confetti, I wasn’t sure how to take his remark.

After a moment, he went on. “I mean that all forms of love are accepted here. All forms.”

And then I got what he was saying. He was asking me about whether I preferred men. He was—the thought socked me in the chest to where I audibly gasped—asking about Nelyo. I was convinced of this. He was looking at me with a soft, pitying gaze, the kind people use when they want to encourage you to burst into tears on their shoulder and unburden your pain for their entertainment. Maybe he needed lyrics for his song and planned to use me—the forlorn victim of the “strange fates” that the Valar teach about, in love with his own cousin, for the love of Oromë’s bird—as his inspiration?

I was terrified, but I covered it with laughter. “Yes, I know that, Cousin! And so do the maidens of this village of fishmongers!”

He wasn’t fooled. “It’s okay, Findekáno.”

I laughed again. “Tell that to my father!” and something closed in his expression then—like the lid to a box dropped shut—and he went back to playing and scribbling and never mentioned it again.

But when I arrived in Tirion to find him in the throes of preparation for his performance, I regretted not telling him. A housekeeper opened the door to Macalaurë’s house—or I assumed he was a housekeeper—or someone opened the door in a smock with soprano and alto recorders sticking out of the pocket. His hair like dark steel marked him as Telerin, and he had no clue who I was. As I explained my relationship to Macalaurë—his oldest cousin, we grew up together, all that—his eyes narrowed. “I’m sorry it seems you weren’t informed,” he said at last, a little stiffly, “but Macalaurë has rented a house for visiting relatives.”

“That’s lovely! I’d just like to see—”

“The performance is three days away” was all the response I got and maybe it was a mercy. If I’d forced my way into the house, demanded an audience with my cousin, and all to ask after Nelyo, whom I’d denied loving in any exceptional way? It was a version of the same predicament that had hemmed me in all this time: that I knew Nelyo better than anyone and I monopolized him any time I could, so I could hardly ask after him now without betraying something of what had transpired between us. I took the proffered note with the address for the family residence and started in the direction he waved me before the door slammed between us.

Perhaps Nelyo would be at the family residence. I knew he wouldn’t be; Macalaurë would no sooner turn him away than I would. But perhaps.

The house was one of the tall, thin houses stacked in rows that crowd the city as it edges closer to the sea. The Teleri didn’t bother with gardens and fountains like my people did. There was a walkway across a short yard filled with pebbles. The top of the house was flat and encased in railings so that its residents could enjoy a view of the sea. The back, I knew, would be all open windows and balconies, but the front was painted wood and curtained windows like closed eyes. I let myself in.

Turukáno sat up on the sofa where he’d been reading. “Findekáno? I did not expect you!”

“Yes, well,” I said and the surprise in his eyes turned to delight as he intimated my reason for being there.

“I don’t think you’re going to find Our Cousin here,” he said, and he was right. Over the next three days, our father arrived, then Aunt Eärwen with Artanis (they stayed at the palace but took meals with us), and the day before the performance, Fëanáro arrived with Carnistir and Curufinwë as ever in tow. I tried several more times to gain access to Macalaurë or at least his wife Vingarië but was rebuffed each time by a small squadron of servants or musicians or whomever who seemingly surrounded him always. The recorders and pitch pipes in their pockets might have been truncheons. If Nelyo was here, he’d be with Macalaurë, not in the residence with the rest of the family. And I’d ruined it, dammit, by going to Macalaurë’s house first thing and therefore ensuring Nelyo’s reclusion. At least constantly banging on Macalaurë’s door allowed me to avoid the family residence. My father was introducing himself as Finwë’s representative at the performance, and Uncle Fëanáro was seething over it and making comments that were progressing rapidly from passive-aggressive to just plain aggressive and I didn’t feel like becoming, in Nelyo’s absence, the referee.

A few hours before the performance, Findaráto and Artaher arrived, and Írissë with Tyelkormo, and Aunt Nerdanel last of all with the twins. Our family box at the performance was nearly too full; Ambarussa graciously sat on the ground and only Turukáno noted that I wasn’t supposed to be there at all. Most of our family was there by that point.

But not Nelyo.

~oOo~

The performance began the moment the Lights began to mingle. The venue had been constructed on a small rise above the beach, overlooking the spill of Light from the Calcirya across the sea. Naturally, Macalaurë did not need to dread rain; I saw several of the Valar take seats in one of the boxes opposite us. The colorless mingled Light of the Trees shattered upon the water to glitter many-hued: pink and blue and gold spangles hemmed on either side by cobalt waters that melted at the horizon with the star-strewn sky. Macalaurë was alone on the stage with his harp.

I wondered briefly where all those musicians (or maybe they had been servants after all? Macalaurë’s relationship with his father had always been uneasy, but it was hard to imagine any of the Fëanárions rejected that particular value from their upbringing) who had accosted me had gone. And then I stopped wondering.

Macalaurë started playing.

I swear to you, the Light on the water answered the notes of his song. It surged gold, then blushed pale and pink. It softened like a sigh, then arose so sharp and splendid that I had to squint to withstand it. Somewhere in there, the other musicians came in, but I had ears only for the rain of Macalaurë’s harp and eyes only for the light-strewn water at his back. The audience was silent, rapt. Even my father; even his. On the ground beside me, Ambarussa had curled his hand to hold the back of my calf, his lips breathless and parted, like he needed to touch me to bear whatever his brother’s music was making him feel. I understood. Írissë and Artanis were holding hands; the shoulders of Fëanáro and Nerdanel had gradually sank toward each other and now were touching. Tyelkormo stood behind Ambarto with his hands planted on his shoulders, as though to keep him from drifting into the stars. Were Nelyo here, I would need to touch him too: a shoulder or a thigh or even a foot pressing firm against his.

It took everyone several moments to realize the music had ended and it was intermission. Macalaurë would return to play at the height of the Mingling. I didn’t think I could stand it.

My family began to move slowly, like flowers unfolding. Arms stretched; bodies pulled away from each other. Nerdanel kissed Fëanáro’s cheek and gathered the twins to take them to buy a snack from the street vendors who had flocked around the venue in anticipation of intermission. Artanis saw a friend and ran off, hand-in-hand with Írissë. Eärwen, in her sweet and sincere way, paused on her way out to the vendors to put an arm around Fëanáro and say, “Your son, he’s nothing short of extraordinary,” and Fëanáro said, “I know,” for once not sounding arrogant but slightly surprised, like he-who-knew-so-much had discovered something new too. Eärwen went down to the street, followed by Findaráto.

Turukáno was saying to Artaher, “I am surprised Our Cousin is not here.” Artaher, who was guiless and incapable of cruelty, darted a look at me. “Maitimo, I mean,” Turukáno continued.

There was a carafe of wine in our box. My father was filling a glass from it. “I doubt he can travel yet,” he remarked offhandedly, “else I’m sure he’d be here for his brother. Fëanáro, do you want—”

“What do you mean, you ‘doubt he can travel yet’?” Eyes narrowed, my uncle interrupted the small gesture of peace—probably coaxed out by the effects of music and Light—with all the subtlety of an axe sundering branch from tree.

Peace is a meek, shrinking thing, easily interrupted, in my family. My father had begun to lift a glass for my uncle. He plunked it back down and sauntered with his own back to his seat. He was not one to be cowed by his half-brother’s acrimony after all these years. Light and music, I suppose, were swiftly wearing off.

“Maitimo sustained a head injury just over a fortnight ago.” My father’s voice would have sounded sympathetic to any listener who knew him less than me. I heard the note of triumph in telling Fëanáro something he didn’t know, and about his firstborn son at that.

“Findekáno tripped him on the steps,” Turukáno added helpfully.

Fëanáro whipped around to look at me.

“You did?” said Tyelkormo with all the artless disbelief of a small child.

“It was an accident!” I said.

“This is awkward, Fëanáro,” my father continued. “I would have informed you myself but assumed …” He let himself trail off there and the unspoken words were louder than if he’d shouted from the bottom of his lungs:

I would have assumed that your firstborn son and heir would have contacted you first to let you know of his devastating injury.

“Why would you do that?” Tyelkormo was flushed and no longer sounded like a child. He sounded like an angry Fëanárion. (I have considerable experience in this area.)

I tried to hold back the onrush with all the effectiveness of a waist-high pyramid of sandbags against a storm surge. “He probably didn’t write, Uncle, because he can’t write … I mean, he’s not allowed, not for three weeks—”

“Oh there were plenty of people around to write for him,” Turukáno noted.

“Three weeks?” Now Fëanáro was wrathful too. “How bad was this injury?”

“Oh he had a concussion,” said Turukáno. “A full concussion. The stairs were made of stone.”

I knew the flashfire of my uncle’s anger. It had never been directed at me, but I’d seen it directed at my cousins many times, and I’d heard rumor of his cruelty toward my father (but was better protected there both by my father and my own deliberate detachment from family politics). It was like one of those conflagrations that eats up everything around it in a matter of seconds and seems to burn itself out, until you step on the site and melt the bottom of your shoe to the earth. Fëanáro’s rage quickly cooled into cunning. He turned to me, but it was not to berate me for disabling his son for three weeks because of an “accident” on the stairs. “Findekáno,” he said, and his voice was as warm and kind as it had been when we’d been discussing the populations of river salmon in the north just a few days earlier, “I would have thought you’d tell me of this while you were a guest in my home in Formenos.” He rose and headed for the wine.

The lanterns dimmed and brightened again, signaling the end of intermission.

Now it was my father’s turn to sound surprised. “Formenos? Why were you in Formenos?” Unlike Fëanáro, who naturally mustered wrath when caught off-guard, my father sounded simply … unguarded. I was sorry for him.

“I never asked,” said Fëanáro, gesturing at my father with an empty glass. “He’s always had a home with me and mine, and he always will.”

These words that had welcomed me back to his table just days earlier now had a cunning edge to them. The rest of the family was taking their places among us, but my father, Fëanáro, Turukáno, Tyelkormo, Artaher, and me—we were frozen in a tableau, my uncle drinking his wine, my father trying to rescue his composure before his hurt became any more apparent, Tyelkormo seething at me, Artaher trying to become invisible, and Turukáno not even bothering to hide his smug smile.

And I? I was the bone being fought over between them.

The music began again. The Light on the sea behind it gathered in answer. I didn’t hear or see much of it.

I just wanted Nelyo back worse than ever.

~oOo~

After the performance, the musicians who’d worked with Macalaurë came through the audience, distributing gifts to thank us for our attendance: small harps and flutes and drums. They looked far less hostile skipping and leaping with crowns of sea-roses upon their silvery hair, but I recognized them as the same who’d kept me from my cousin all these days. I accepted a small star-shaped tambourine dressed with green ribbons, which I sat right away on the bench. I was miserable and in no mood for playing with it.

My father and Fëanáro were at opposite sides of the box with their backs turned to each other. Fëanáro, in his typically clever way, had taken the side with the wine. I should have refilled my father’s glass for him but I was also in no mood to interact with either of them.

Maybe softened by the music or some latent love for me, Turukáno was beginning to feel remorse for stirring the stew, which is how my Aunt Nerdanel put it. “Don’t stir the stew!” she would always warn her boys when one of them was trying to provoke a situation and make it worse. Turukáno, I fumed to myself, was a stew-stirrer, and then I felt childish and foolish for even thinking it. But he was edging closer and closer to me with the small harp he’d been given tucked under his arm. “That was breathtaking,” he said by way of an overture.

“It was.” I know he was talking about the performance. I was not.

He ran his fingers down the strings of the harp. For a trinket handed out after a concert, it sounded remarkably lovely. “What do you think this is for?”

“It’s a harp.”

He laughed. “I know that. It’s just so small. It’s just an octave and no accidentals—”

“There are entire musical traditions composed to be played upon such harps,” I snapped. I sounded like Nelyo, just impatient. Nelyo’s favorite song was among them, a traditional song from Cuiviénen about the light of the stars on the lake. He and Macalaurë had worked on it together, Nelyo researching the folk tradition and Macalaurë reconstructing the song. They’d performed it together at a meeting of the Lambengolmor, the only time I’d ever attended such a meeting. I decided I’d had enough of being coy. “Our Cousin’s favorite song can be played upon such a harp, in fact, small enough to be carried in a pack on the Great Journey.”

Turukáno watched me for a moment, then pushed the harp in my hands. “Take it then. Maybe it will help you find him.” I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not.

~oOo~

So this is what it came down to. I would go to my grandfather. I would beg him to know where Nelyo had gone. I wouldn’t care for his questions and confusion. I would care only for his answer. Then I’d go there, wherever Nelyo’d gone—be it as far as the Outer Lands—and play his favorite song on my stupid tiny harp beneath his window until he came out. And then I’d talk to him. And tell him I loved him. And he’d hopefully forgive me.

I’d managed to secure a ride on a fast message wagon back to Tirion early the next morning, mostly delivering ecstatic messages from those who had witnessed Macalaurë’s performance, urging kinsfolk to pass through the Calcirya to Alqualondë to hear him. He’d play this composition just four more times.

The drivers of messenger wagons are always chatty fellows. They spend their days, alone most of the time, on wagons that rattle so fast over the roads that they can scarcely hear their own thoughts. When, rarely, they procure a passenger, they tend to shout at him for the entire ride. I knew quite a bit about my driver’s new daughter, his experiments with cider-making, his thoughts on the short-sleeved fashions coming up from Alqualondë—and there, my brain simply could not absorb any more. I made appropriate sounds of interest and even asked a few questions. He didn’t need to go as far as the royal circle, but he did anyway, to save me the walk.

It was still early. The first scribes and scholars in their formal robes were crossing the square toward the palaces and libraries where they worked. After Alqualondë, everything looked very … linear. Orderly. A woman pushing a small handcart sold biscuits and honey. She wasn’t singing or calling or pushing her cart noisily over the cobbles like the vendors in Alqualondë. She just stood and waited and trusted her custom would come. The few shops in this quarter were just opening their doors, and a few were still shut up tight. The fountains were the noisiest thing, and even they seemed muffled.

I walked up the long stairs to my grandfather’s palace. He would be just arriving to his study, where he’d be served a cup of strong tea. That was usually Nelyo’s job; it was far beneath him to make tea, even for a king, but our grandfather adored it, and so Nelyo made it without complaint. My grandfather’s clerk (normally that’d be Nelyo) would have been in for an hour already and prepared his papers for the day. He’d be starting at the top of the pile.

Clerks and scribes were talking in low voices in the hall; none acknowledged me. I walked briskly to my grandfather’s study at the end of the hall like I belonged. I suppose I do? I am the firstborn son of the other high prince? There was an antechamber with a wide desk where Nelyo usually worked. He managed the constant flow of visitors, helping where he could and allowing those whom only the king could assist through to see our grandfather. Thinking back to Macalaurë and those surprisingly obstinate Telerin musicians, I hoped I would not have to persuade whomever was in Nelyo’s place while he recovered to let me through. No. I was done with that. I was thoroughly fed up. I was the grandson to the king, the firstborn son of the second high prince. Fuck it. I would just go through.

I mustered my courage for this potential confrontation as I walked, rehearsed lines that I thought sounded assertive but not rude, and visualized how I would stand and act as I delivered those lines. I felt like Turukáno, learning swordplay via daydreams.

But when I arrived at my grandfather’s study, the antechamber was empty. There were books and parchments, a discarded quill, upon the desk, and a mechanical timepiece ticked loudly, but there was no sign otherwise that a clerk had replaced Nelyo. My grandfather’s door was closed. I sniffed for the aroma of tea and, smelling nothing, took a seat in one of the plush chairs lining the wall.

It occurred to me that, without Nelyo, the wheels of Noldorin governance had simply ground to a half. After the sight of my family these past few days, I was able to believe in that possibility.

The door to my grandfather’s study opened suddenly. I leaped from my chair and planted my feet as I’d imagined. Figure 44 in Footwork for Swords. I remembered: It was how one squared up against a potential foe. It was stabilizing without being overtly combative. I turned a shoulder toward the person passing through the door and lifted my chin in a way that I hoped looked unyielding but not haughty. I prepared to announce that “I expect to see my grandfather!” to the clerk who—

Was Nelyo.

He was just as stunned as me, although, as always, I felt like he covered it better. He reached down to shuffle a stack of papers, which I knew to be a sign of nerves; otherwise, he was unperturbed by my presence there. His hair was neatly braided and completely off his face; his robes were impeccable. As usual. I planted my feet harder to hopefully draw his attention from the fact that I didn’t seem able to close my mouth. Figure 45. Decidedly combative. My jaw drooped like an unattended marionette.

Finally, I decided I might as well hide behind concern for him. “What are you doing here?” I asked. “You’re not supposed to be working!”

His eyebrows lifted. “Findekáno, the three weeks of rest ended two days ago.”

I boggled at that but, even in my shock, the sums were quickly managed in my head. The days I’d moped around Tirion, the two-day journey to Formenos, the stay in Formenos, the two days back, my time in Alqualondë—it did add up to three weeks and two days.

“Where did you go?” I asked at last. “Manwë’s wind, I went after you.”

And something broke then. Nelyo laughed, one of those brilliant laughs like the Light on the water. “Of course you did. Do you think I didn’t know you would? That’s why I told you I was going. It was the only way to guarantee myself peace, to give you something to chase that you couldn’t catch.” Seeing that I didn’t join him in laughter, he forced himself back to sobriety, though the corner of his mouth twitched and gave him away. “I’ve been here the whole time, Káno. With Grandfather. Not working, per Nimelomë’s orders, but listening to some of the students read, walking in the garden—nothing remarkable.”

“And now?”

He shrugged. “I’m back home.”

“Home?”

“Well, your house. It’s nearer; I can sleep in a few extra minutes in the morning. Anyway. I’m glad you’ve made it back. I restarted our grocery order, and it came with an awful lot of chard to eat by myself— What are you doing?"

I was fumbling the tiny harp from my pack. “I went all the way to Formenos, then to Alqualondë, looking for you. I brought this harp back from your brother’s performance and—”

“Oh? How was it? I was thinking of going tomorrow night—”

I silenced him with a raised finger. “I brought this back,” I said, “to serenade you—after I broke into Grandfather’s study, of course, and forced him to reveal where you’d gone—and win you back by playing that song you love? The one you discovered with Macalaurë?”

“You were going to force Grandfather to—”

“And I entirely plan to have my way.”

Nelyo gave me a sharp look. “Put that away! Are you mad? You can play it for me tonight. Now is not the appropriate—”

And he stopped. Because I put it away.

“Then come home now,” I said. “Maybe we can go to your brother’s performance tonight? And stay in Olwë’s palace, in that room with the little pool? You’d rather hear Macalaurë than me anyway.”

“Go home, Findekáno. I’ll be there as soon as I can, but in the meantime, I have work to do.” He glanced down at the parchments and books strewn across his desk and winced. “A lot of work to do.” He winced again.

“Nelyo—?”

“I’m fine.” He slid into his chair. “Just … the headache … I feel it coming on again.”

I was halfway to him before I noticed the corners of his mouth turned up slightly in a smile.

“Go home, Findekáno,” he said again.

I went.

---

Chapter End Notes

Quenya names:

Nelyafinwë Maitimo Fëanárion (Nelyo) = Maedhros

Findekáno (Káno) = Fingon

Turukáno = Turgon

Fëanáro = Fëanor

Tyelkormo = Celegorm

Carnistir = Caranthir

Curufinwë = Curufin

Ambarto = Amrod

Ambarussa = Amras

Findaráto = Finrod

Artaher = Orodreth

Artanis = Galadriel

Írissë = Aredhel

This was my first time attempting to write a Matryoshka challenge. I make these challenges every year, which rather ruins the possibility of participating since the whole point is not knowing where the prompts will take you next. One of the unintended [good] consequences of the screaming vortex of madness that was the end of my school year was making and then promptly forgetting what I made for the Matryoshka challenge, leaving me able to participate for the first time ever. If you are curious how I satisfied my seven prompts—I can’t continue to foist these upon my beloved SWG without going full-send on one myself, so I chose the hardest challenge—highlight the “spoiler” text below.

Four Loves: I chose eros.

The Chase: The three locations were Formenos, Alqualondë, and finally back to Tirion.

Will They or Won't They? … Of Course They Will: This prompted the scene where Nelyo and Káno became lovers.

Secret Baby: Fëanáro reveals that not only isn’t Nelyo at home but he hasn’t heard from him in over a year.

Adorkable: The final scene, where Findekáno is totally prepared to fight for Nelyo, and his opponent turns out to be … Nelyo. Oops. Calendars are a bitch.

Old Flame: Findekáno is haunted by not confiding in Macalaurë because now Macalaurë can’t understand the gravity of the situation.

With This Ring: The harp. And yes, it is that harp (and Nelyo’s favorite song? Is that song.)